Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links to your site. This way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which could present themselves or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.